When comparing Tox vs Google Hangouts, the Slant community recommends Google Hangouts for most people. In the question“What are the best Skype alternatives?”Google Hangouts is ranked 1st while Tox is ranked 4th. The most important reason people chose Google Hangouts is:

Google offers all features of Hangouts completely free. There are business, education and government solutions that increase the participant count to for video calls to 15 and offers support.

Pros

Pro

Free and open source

The code is licensed under GPL (may change in the future) and is available on GitHub.

Pro

Multiple front-ends for multiple platforms available

At the moment there is no official Tox client, but a selection of 32 and 64 clients for Windows, OS X, Linux and Android is available.

Pro

Privacy focused

Tox uses military grade encryption and works completely peer-to-peer.

Pro

Completely free

Google offers all features of Hangouts completely free. There are business, education and government solutions that increase the participant count to for video calls to 15 and offers support.

Pro

Free group video support

Hangouts works with up to 10 participants using video out of the box or up to 15 if you are a business, government or school. It determines who is the primary speaker at any given time, and the camera view automatically switches to that user.

Pro

Mobile support

Hangouts offers both an Android and iOS app so users can participate from nearly any mobile device in addition to his Desktop.

Pro

Screen sharing

Any user can share his screen (or only a specific desktop or window) while still continuing an audio conversation.

Pro

Cross platform

Hangouts work on Android, iOS, Chrome OS, web and as a Chrome extension.

Pro

Easy to start using

Hangouts is integrated with Gmail & Google+, does not require you to download desktop software, and all chats can take place directly in your browser, significantly reducing the barrier to entry for a new user.

Pro

Useful for businesses

Hangouts can scale to become a videoconferencing solution for an entire company, since the software can run on nearly all platforms. In fact, Google itself uses Hangouts as its meeting room video conference software.

Pro

Integrates with Google Maps for sharing locations

When chatting with people while trying to plan a meet up, the share map button can be extremely useful.

Pro

Live broadcasting and instant recording

With Google+ “Hangouts on Air”, you can broadcast any hangout to an unlimited audience via your Goolge+ Profile or simply a generic YouTube link. Moreover, any Hangout on Air (public or private) is automatically saved as YouTube video that you can keep for private reference or use in any way that you would normally share a YouTube video. This allows you to record conversations without additional obtrusive software.

Pro

Google Voice integration

Allows for a fixed phone number, receiving and making calls. Calling US or Canada is free.

Pro

Android app does both sms and hangouts messaging

Cons

Con

Early stages of development

Since Tox is relatively new, it has important features missing (like group video) and requires a proper code review before it can be deemed reliable and ready for everyday use.

Con

Poor video call quality

Con

Won't work on Windows 8-style UI

As Hangouts uses a browser plugin on the desktop and it doesn't work with Windows 8-style UI, it has to be used in desktop mode.